ColdFusion Alive

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033 The Impact Of Unexpected Load and How To Counter It with Charlie Arehart Aug 28, 2017

Show notes

Charlie Arehart talks about “The Impact Of Unexpected Load and How To Counter It” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. He was one of the speakers at the CF.Objective Conference. In this session, veteran server troubleshooter Charlie Arehart will guide a more detailed review of the issues above, including how to identify such traffic, more on these specific impacts, and most important identifying the solutions along with their pros and cons. He has helped shops achieve dramatic reductions in impact from such automated requests, resulting in greater server stability and performance. Show notes Are Spiders Eating Your Servers? The Impact Of Their Unexpected Load and How To Counter It Where does unexpected load come from? How to identify spiders eating your servers DOS attacks, script kiddies Malformed requests What Google Analytics misses in load Load balancer testing Use a test page rather than probing your homepage every 5 seconds What about robots.txt? Doesn’t that block bots? SaaS Tools that search for “bad” traffic flooding your server and don’t let it into your server Older CFer, older resources Why are you proud to use CF? WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year? What are you looking forward to at CFObjective? For years I’ve watched people try to tame “server problems” with a focus on their code, their SQL, the jvm, and so on. Yet often it turns out that the root cause is actually unexpected load. And that load may be from things you never expected (automated), at volumes you never expected. I’ve found folks with as much as 80% of their web traffic to be such unexpected automated traffic! Worse, there are characteristics of such automated visits that may actually have MORE IMPACT than “real users”: for instance, did you know they create a new session–and run session startup code–for each page they visit?! The good news is there are solutions to better manage (or simply block) such automated requests which may already exist in your environment, and tools you may consider (some free, some commercial) which can be easily implemented. There are even SAAS solutions that could help alleviate such problems with just a single tiny change in your environment! You may also want to consider some admin configuration options related to sessions and/or client variables, as well as reconsider some coding choices in your session startup code. Mentioned in this episode Web spiders Googlebot Yandex Bidu Yahoo slurp FusionReactor User agent header faking IP address spoofing On session start Load Testing Robots.txt CF411.com Cloudflare Cloud/SAAS Firewall-level Application Firewalls tools list CFML Job Resources Ortus Solutions CF Alive episode on What's New In CF 10, 11, And 2016 That You May Have Missed? Mike Brunt Scary DBA Pass conference Database fundamentals CF Slack channel FB programmers group TeraTech blog on CFML online groups Mary Jo Sminkey CFObj Advanced Error Handling Strategies ColdFusion Alive podcast episode Gert Franz CFObj Debugging ColdFusion Alive podcast episode CFML Resource Sites Adobe CF blog blogs.coldfusion.com 2000 sales of CF per quarter CF Summit CF Meetup CFObjective Twitter hashtag Things you can do in DC Listen to the Audio Bio Charlie Arehart A veteran server troubleshooter who’s worked in enterprise IT for more than three decades, Charlie Arehart (@carehart) is a longtime community contributor who as an independent consultant provides short-term, remote, on-demand troubleshooting/tuning assistance for organizations of all sizes and experience levels (carehart.org/consulting). Links Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Web Interview transcript Michael: Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Charlie Arehart and he's a veteran ColdFusion troubleshooter. He has been doing I.T. stuff for so long. We don't even want to talk about that until the second half of the show when we will talk about how long we've been doing things and the benefits of that. But first of all, we're going to talk about unexpected load and how you can counter it and how they may be spiders or other things you didn't even know about. In fact, could you even get to expecting unexpected load? So, lots of crazy stuff there. Charlie’s going to be talking about that at cf.Objective which is coming up soon. So, we'll talk a little bit about that. So welcome back to the show Charlie. Charlie: Thank you for having me Michael. Good to see you. Michael: Yeah, yeah good to see you too coming to us from beautiful downtown Kentucky. Charlie: Not downtown, beautiful rural out. Michael: rural? Charlie: Yes, you're out in the sticks. You escape from the sick city town that's got fifteen hundred people in it. Michael: Goodness me! Charlie: That was from a city that's got you know, fifty thousand people in it. I love it. Michael: You’re quite a way away from dizziness. Charlie: And it’s beautiful here. Michael: You know your land used to have… Charlie: Right the land and then D.C. grown up in D.C. Michael: yeah Charlie: Forty's and then moving to Atlanta from my forties and now here and working from here. And that's why we came here because with the work that I do, it's all remote. I can connect to people and log you know, as long as I got a decent internet connection. I can work from here and I'm looking out at the beautiful vista of trees and sometimes turkeys and deer and all kinds of fun stuff. Michael: That’s amazing, it's incredible what technology has allowed people to do and I’m sure some of the listeners are working with remote as well. Read more And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

032 Going Modular With Fw/1 Subsystems 2.0, with Steven Neiland Aug 14, 2017

Show notes

Steven Neiland talks about “Going Modular With Fw/1 Subsystems 2.0” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. He was one of the speakers at the CF.Objective Conference, and currently works remotely out of Tampa Florida as a senior web developer at SiteVision Inc. Show notes What is FW/1? What is a framework? Why you should be using a framework? Why use an open source ColdFusion framework rather than a homebrew framework Why should CFers be using FW/1 over other CF frameworks? Light weight compared to ColdBox What are the new subsystems 2.0? A cut down version of a FW/1 system Similar to ColdBox modules What is new with FW/1 2.0 subsystems? How to Enable subsystems Create subsystems directory and drop the subsystem there. That is it! No config required. Much easier than in 1.0! How to Access subsystems Conventions Bean factories are easier to use eg DI/1 or Wirebox A kind of Dependency Injection Why should you be using subsystems? When not to use subsystems Auto Wiring Why are you proud to use CF? Easy to get started in. Build for real people rather than computer scientists. WWIT (What Would It Take) for you to make CFML more alive this year? Technical point of view it is very alive. STable language, no quirks, Better PR and marketing to the masses (and not just Fortune 500). Reach schools etc Lucee marketing tour with Gert What are you looking forward to at CFObjective? Glad Adobe is back Hanging out with the Lucee guys and new features WWIT for you to make cf.Objective more alive this year? A reflexion of the state of CFML Adobe CF Summit has pull some of Lucee more blog posts and ra-ra more awesomeness WWIT to make Lucee more alive this year? Better docs - key for an open source language. Expand. More comprehensive. Easier to get into Marketing Tech issues compared to other languages Moment JS and CFML Building web applications today involves writing a lot of repetitive code. Frameworks and snippets take reduce some of this right off that bat, however we can take this a step further. We FW/1's new subsystem architecture to make whole workflows reusable as modules. By modularizing your code you can not only reuse it for other projects with minimal work, you can also share fixes and improvements between projects that use the same module automatically. In addition, you simplify your code base by breaking you monolith down into discrete segments which you can then dedicate developers to without those developer needing to know the intricacies of the parent applications the module will integrate with later on. Mentioned in this episode FW/1 Sean Corfield ColdBox Fusebox Ryan Cogswell created subsystems FW/1 Sections, Items “Stand on the shoulders of giants by using an open source framework” Framework Abuse Bean factory Dependency Injection DI/1 Wirebox Using Subsystems in FW/1 Listen to the Audio Bio Steven Neiland Originally from Cork Ireland, Steven Neiland currently works remotely out of Tampa Florida as a senior web developer at SiteVision Inc. Links LinkedIn Twitter GitHub Interview transcript Michael: Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Steve Neiland and he is senior developer at ‘Site Vision’ and he's joining us here from Florida; where it's probably hot and sunny and humid as it usually is in Florida at this time of the year. Steve: It's only eighty degrees. Michael: Only eighty degrees. All right well that'll get you ready for Washington D.C., the height of summer where you're going to be in a few weeks at sea 00:29 [inaudible]. And today's episode, Stephen and I are going to talk about going modular with FW1- frame work 1 using subsystems and he's going to talk about a 2.0 version of that. And we'll look at what framework 1 is for those you don't know and why you should be using a framework being factories and while there are exciting things to do with that. And also about subsystems and how you enable them and access them and whether you should be using them and if so how. And we'll also have a look at see if objective and maybe we’ll mention Lucy a little bit too. So welcome Stephen. Steve: Thanks for having me. Michael: You're welcome. Now I hear you have a slight accent where you're originally from a country in Europe? Steve: Yes, I'm from County Cork Ireland originally. Michael: Fabulous, sounds beautiful. So you gave up rainy, damp weather to have hot and sunny Floridian weather. Steve: Yes and I'm not going back I like it warm. Michael: Well, I can understand. I used to live in England and I found it a bit rainy and dark in the winter. Steve: What part of England were you in? Michael: I was in a town called Maidenhead Berkshire which was in the south, still is in the south as far as I know. Steve: you hope Michael: Yes, I hope. Steve: It washed away you never know. Read more And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

031 Everything CF Summit That You Need to Know, with Elishia Dvorak Aug 09, 2017

Show notes

Elishia Dvorak talks about “Everything CF Summit That You Need to Know” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. She was one of the speakers at the CFObjective Conference, and she is the Technical marketing manager for ColdFusion. Show notes What exactly is CF Summit? The largest developer focused Adobe conference Largest conference focused on ColdFusion and related technologies Large budget Why is it so important to the CF Community? Shows the commitment of Adobe for CF Lots of CF tech info to learn Why all CFer should go? 40 sessions rich with CF info 2 keynotes optional labs and workshops The most Adobe CF folks Network with CFer you have only met online before When is it? Thurs-Friday Nov 16-17 2017 Wed Nov 15 optional labs and workshops Where is it? The Mirage, Las Vegas The hotel is nearer the conference floor (2 minutes from the elevator to the conference space. No need to walk Tropical pool setting and wildlife exhibits How much does it cost? Early bird price $349 $130 pre-conference labs Extra discount Announce2017 $249 Special discounts for government employees or group discount cfsummit (at) adobe.com Easy to get low priced plane tickets to Las Vegas including Southwest How many years has CF Summit been running? 5 years! What is new this year? New venue New CF content More hands on lab workshops 4 tracks, 40 sessions Revealing the Speakers and topics that you are excited about Charlie Arehart What is new in CF 10, 11 and 2016 that you didn’t know about Brian Klass AWS and CF, auto scaling Adobe Engineers behinds the scenes of CF 2018 features Nolan Erck Aguilar.js and CF The Special Event this year? Thursday night Casino view + free drinks event at restaurant No loud band Other things you can do in Vegas? Stay over the weekend after the event for fun Bring your spouse and kids Casinos Big Shows - Mystère by Cirque du Soleil. Michael Jackson ONE by Cirque du Soleil. LOVE Cirque du Soleil. O Le Rêve - The Dream. Pitbull - Time Of Our Lives. Blue Man Group at Luxor. Criss Angel MINDFREAK LIVE! ... KÀ by Cirque du Soleil. Criss Angel MINDFREAK LIVE! David Copperfield Penn & Teller Piff the Magic Dragon Show Boyz II Men Britney: Piece of Me Carlos Santana Céline Dion Donny & Marie Elton John The Million Dollar Piano Jennifer Lopez ALL I HAVE Reba, Brooks & Dunn Tenors of Rock The Righteous Brothers Wayne Newton: Up Close and Personal World Famous Gospel Brunch at House of Blues Amazing locations Venetian gondolas Bellagio fountains Great restaurants and bars from simple to swanky Why are you proud to be involved in CF? WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year? CF Summit More CF training What are you looking forward to at CF Summit? Mentioned in this episode Las Vegas show CFObjective Conference Listen to the Audio Bio Elishia Dvorak Elishia is the Technical marketing manager for ColdFusion. She started out as a CF developer. Links CFSummit Questions: cfsummit (at) adobe.com LinkedIn Twitter Adobe blogs Elishia (at) adobe.com Interview transcript Michael: Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Elishia Dvorak from Adobe and she is the technical marketing manager for cold fusion and in charge of C.F. summit and we're going to talk today everything about CFSummit that you need to know. And we're going to look at what exactly C.F. summit is and why it is so important to the cold fusion community. Why every cold fusion developer should be going to this and we’ll also look at the technical details of when it is, where it is, how much it costs, special discounts. We’ll look at what's new this year and we’ll be revealing for the first time the speakers and topics of just being announced real soon now that Elishia is excited about. And also a little sneak peek info on the special event this year. So, welcome Elishia. Elishia: Thank you Michael and thanks for having me and hello everyone, nice to virtually meet you and talk with you today. I'm really excited about cold fusion summit this year. So, really excited to get into the detail and what you know about it. Michael: Great! So for those people probably a few percent of people listening don't know what cold fusion summit is but let's make sure everyone knows what it is. Read more And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

030 Design Patterns for amazing app architecture (16 patterns), with Brad Wood Jul 25, 2017

Show notes

Brad Wood talks about “Design Patterns for amazing app architecture (16 patterns)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. He is one of the speakers at the CFObjective Conference, a system architect for Ortus Solution and lead developer of the CommandBox CLI. Show notes What is a design pattern? Why should you be using them in your projects? Commons solutions to common problems Becoming a better software craftsman Architect better apps Command box 2-day training Extending Command box Why are you proud to use CF? WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year? What are you looking forward to at CFObjective? Patterns to talk about Builder Object pool Singleton Strategy Composite Decorator Facade Front controller Chain of responsibility Memento Observer (publish/subscribe) Double checked locking Anti-patterns Anemic domain model God object Premature optimization Readable, clear, concise code first Then only optimize code pieces that are slow Improbability factor Honorable mentions Law of demeter Not too many dots in lines of code for class use Too many dots make you dotty Principle of least astonishment Brook’s Law Mentioned in this episode Design patterns book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software was published in 1994 by the so-called "Gang of Four" Code Complete is a software development book, written by Steve McConnell Book Mythical Man Month by Albert Brooks Command box training Sean Corfield article on Anemic domain model in the ColdFusion Quarterly Cyclomatic complexity Code smell MVC WORM = Write Once, Read Many code FusionReactor auto profiler Jenkins run time test recording Command box 3.7 directory watchers Testbox code coverage (with FusionReactor) Travis CI Docker Docker Swarm Forgebox DevOps Best Practices CFconfig app Lucee CFML Book Uncle Bob’s clean code Listen to the Audio Bio Brad Wood Brad grew up in southern Missouri and after high school majored in Computer Science with a music minor at MidAmerica Nazarene University (Olathe, KS). Today he lives in Kansas City with his wife and three girls. Brad enjoys all sorts of international food and the great outdoors. Brad has been programming ColdFusion since 2001 and has used every version of CF since 4.5. He first fell in love with ColdFusion as a way to easily connect a database to his website for dynamic pages. He enjoys configuring and performance tuning high-availability Windows and Linux ColdFusion environments as well as SQL Server. Brad is the ColdBox Platform developer advocate at Ortus Solutions and lead developer of the CommandBox CLI. Links CFML slack box channel Twitter brad * WWIT= What Would It Take? Interview transcript Michael: Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Brad Wood and he is the amazing application system architect for Ortus Solutions as well as being evangelist for many of their Box products. Today, we’re going to be talking about design patterns so you can have amazing architecture in your apps and there's a whole bunch of patterns we're going to look at. We’re going to look at just in case you’ve been asleep for the last 20 years and missed what a design pattern was and how it affects coding. We’re going to look at that and why you should be using them and how they can be common solutions to common problems and help you produce better code in less time. In fact, generally, just become better software craftsman and architect apps better. Also, we'll briefly look into the CommandBox two-day training that Brad is doing before the cfObjective conference. He's giving a talk on design patterns at cfObjective which is only weeks away now so, very excited for that. Welcome Brad. Brad Wood: Thank you, Michael. Michael: Just for folks who don't know, what is design pattern and I'm assuming it's nothing to do with design and Photoshop and all that, It's all to do with coding. Read more And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

029 Behind the Scenes at CFObjective, with Carol Hamilton Jul 17, 2017

Show notes

Carol Hamilton talks about “Behind the scenes at cfObjective” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. She is one of the speakers at the CFObjective Conference and the cf.Objective Co-chairperson content advisory board and steering committee. Show notes Hot Speakers this year New topic this year New Location Discounted govt rate and one day option Her role in the conference What are you looking forward to at CFObjective? Mentioned in this episode Speakers http://www.cfobjective.com/speakers/ Schedule http://www.cfobjective.com/schedule/ Register http://www.cfobjective.com/register/ Listen to the Audio Bio Carol Hamilton Carol is the cf.Objective Co-chairperson content advisory board and steering committee. She helps pick the venue, does marketing, advertising, and has been meeting every week for nearly a year to make the conference the best one yet. When she is not busy on the conference she is a super mom and developer Links Twitter Interview transcript Michael: Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Carol Hamilton, and she is gonna talk about some of the behind the scene's info at this year's CF Objective. We're gonna look at some of the exciting speakers at the conference, some of the topics coming up that are interesting, and talk about the location, which has changed since last year. There's also some interesting options available this year that weren't available in prior year objectives. We'll talk about Carol's role in how putting CF Objective together. So welcome, Carol. Carol Hamilton: Hey, thanks for having me. Michael: So what are the speakers that you are interested in this year? I know you're involved in helping pick the speakers, so you probably know everything about all the speakers. Carol Hamilton: Yeah, I guess that's the problem with asking me that is that I do know all the speakers and I get to know them pretty well working with them over the year, over multiple years, seeing them around. So I mean, I'm not gonna be able to pick a favorite but I would have to say I'm super excited to see Mark Usher back. Did you ever get to see Mark Usher around when you were around? Read more Michaela Light is the host of the CF Alive Podcast and has interviewed more than 100 ColdFusion experts. In each interview, she asks "What Would It Take to make CF more alive this year?" The answers still inspire her to continue to write and interview new speakers. Michaela has been programming in ColdFusion for more than 20 years. She founded TeraTech in 1989. The company specializes in ColdFusion application development, security and optimization. She has also founded the CFUnited Conference and runs the annual State of the CF Union Survey. Join the CF Alive revolution Discover how we can all make CF more alive, modern and secure this year. Join other ColdFusion developers and managers in the CF Alive Inner Circle today. Get early access to the CF Alive book and videos Be part of a new movement for improving CF's perception in the world. Contribute to the CF Alive revolution Connect with other CF developers and managers There is no cost to membership.

028 Advanced Error Handling for ColdFusion, Javascript and SQL with Mary Jo Sminkey Jul 10, 2017

Show notes

Mary Jo Sminkey talks about “Advanced Error Handling Strategies for ColdFusion, Javascript and SQL” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. She is one of the speakers at the CFObjective Conference and a long-time ColdFusion developer, having worked with CF since the Allaire days, and for many years she authored and sold one of the most popular eCommerce platforms for the language, CFWebstore. Today she works for CFWebtools as a Senior Developer, continuing to support and build large eCommerce websites. Show notes Why every CFer should be doing error logging CF error logging Global Error Handler Capturing Different Scopes Preventing unwieldy numbers of error emails Logging to capture larger amounts of data vs. emailing all errors Tracking User Actions Per user history of pages accessed held in session scope Shopping cart contents User account info JS/Ajax error logging Ajax tracker in user session Track Ajax request parameters Log Ajax response and/or success SQL Server error logging Stored procedures errors Log table to log SP params and info Unexpected NULL values Strategies for debugging errors on live sites Variety of open source and 3rd party solutions for error logging Using site analytics to track and fix issues on their live sites 404 errors 301 redirects Log events in analytics Search results events Full Stack Application performance management tools Full user interactions tracking Reporting on performance too All in one place Why are you proud to use CF? WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year? More developer outreach to bring in new developers - we are still developing it, cool new features What are you looking forward to at CFObjective? Mentioned in this episode Mary Jo’s full custom CF error handler Only emailing on unique errors Bugsnag - with REST API collector, Javascript collector, subscribe to bug, track as fixed, renotify if it comes back, bug high level alerts, searchable by customer IP BuglogHQ - open source CF tool FusionReactor for slow CF pages and SQL queries Source maps for minified production JS code CodeKit (for Mac) Jenkins build server JSON structure saved to server and displayed with JSON viewer Solr search Browser Hawk CFLOG Logbox Dynatrace Cisco Appdynamics Listen to the Audio Bio Mary Jo Sminkey Mary Jo is a long-time ColdFusion developer, having worked with CF since the Allaire days, and for many years she authored and sold one of the most popular ecommerce platforms for the language, CFWebstore. Today she works for CFWebtools as a Senior Developer, continuing to support and build large ecommerce websites. In her spare time, she enjoys a wide variety of hobbies, including dog training and showing, sewing, knitting, board gaming, origami, handbell choir and other musical pursuits, and is a reviewer for Amazon products via their Vine program. She is a cancer survivor and suffers from fibromyalgia as well as various RSI issues from years of computer work so encourages young developers to pay attention to their ergonomics and learning how to ensure a healthy work environment. She enjoys cosplaying and attending conventions and runs a Facebook group for Cosplay with Disabilities which helps advocate and support people who cosplay with disabilities and the challenges that entails. Links CFWebtools blog Twitter Facebook (* WWIT = What Would It Take) Interview transcript Michael: Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Mary Jo Sminkey, and she is speaking at cf.Objective() on advanced error handling strategies for ColdFusion, JavaScript and SQL Server. We're gonna be looking in this episode, why everyone listening should be doing error logging, what is ... you can do for ColdFusion error logging, but JavaScript, and Ajax error logging, and SQL Server error logging. Strategies you can use for debugging errors on a live site. We'll look at some open source and third party solutions for error logging, and how you can use site analytics to track and fix issues on a live site. Also, we'll look at some full stack application performance management tools you may not have used yet that are really handy. So, welcome Mary Jo. Mary Jo Sminkey: Hi Mike! Michael: Hey, so let's start off with the 64,000 pound elephant in the room because I bet not everyone listening is doing error logging, and why should they be doing it? Mary Jo Sminkey: Well, basically when you get customers from emails, from your ... Sorry from your customers, or your clients, usually they have absolutely no detail. They just say your website sucks, it's broken, I can't check out. They give you no detail at all. If you've ever tried to get some details from your customers, it usually fails miserably. My goal has always been how can I get enough information about what's happening for the users on the website that I can debug those errors without having to ask them for help because they are going to be absolutely no help at all. In old days, a lot of us would just check ColdFusion error logs, or email the CF error dump to ourselves. Our applications have gotten a lot more complicated. There's a lot more components to it, so this is often not enough information. My goal has been to continually, gradually, incrementally improve what I'm doing for my, not just my error logging, but the way I notify myself of errors, what's included in that information, and how I can collect enough information about what's going on that I can figure out what the problem is, and fix it. Read more And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

027 State of CF Union Survey 2017 pt.2, with Brad Wood Jun 22, 2017

Show notes

Welcome back to the part 2 of the State of the ColdFusion Union 2017 Survey analysis. In case you missed it, follow this link to read the State of The CF Union 2017 Analysis part 1. Filling out CF surveys Usually, there are more respondents once the results are out. When we put out, we say, "Okay, this is the final survey results," another flurry of people say, "Oh yeah, I forgot to do it," and they come in and fill it out. Even though it's a relatively small sample of the population, State of the CF Union survey is the largest out of the ColdFusion surveys, so probably one does get the best sampling, from the survey. And it's a free survey. We tell as many people as we can about it and if anyone . There were a few comments from people saying, "How can we get 'regular ColdFusion programmer starts the survey'?" They're not part of the social spheres, and it's very difficult to get things in front of them. It can be frustrating sometimes. There's people that do show up sometimes at conferences and you ask them about a certain technology and if they're using it. It might be three or four years old, and their response is, "I've never heard of that." That's one of the frustrating parts, this other area of opportunity is increasing the engagement of the CF community out there so people are more familiar with what's going on. CFML Slack has been a fantastic platform. Brad’s example: ‘’Recently, somebody asked on CFML Slack about a querying language for ColdFusion, and I happened to see it and so I gave them a link to a query builder project that Eric Peterson made a while back, and like four other people all saw it and said, "Oh, that looks really amazing. I'll try that." I was thinking CF Slack's sort of like the telegraph of our time for ColdFusion developers. It's really brought the communication points together so it's a lot easier for people to hear about stuff like this. The trick is just you have to onboard people to get them there. ‘’ A lot of people in the dark-matter-part of the ColdFusion community don't even know these conferences exist. In fact, they may not even know CF version 2016 exists. No one’s trying to make fun of people, it's just how would you hear about it if you're not on a mailing list and you're not in a social community? They may not even know that Lucee open-source exists and that there's a free open source version of CFML. One of the good things about this survey is a fair number of people have said after reading the results, they suddenly realize some technologies that existed that they had never heard of. There were a couple of write-in responses. Someone said, "I had no idea there were so many options in ColdFusion." This could be a useful thing. It takes a lot of work to put the survey together and it takes a lot of work for everyone who fills out the survey too, but it's very valuable because it does make people aware of what new technologies are out there and what trends are out there. Here’s what you will find in the part 2 of this analysis: 25. What type of mobile development frameworks are you using? 26. What aspects of ColdFusion are keeping you or your company using it? 27. What aspects of ColdFusion are preventing you or your company from embracing? 28. What caching solutions are CFers using? 29. What miscellaneous frameworks/tools are you using? 30. What monitoring tools are you using? 31. What types of deployments do you use? 32. What do you use to build REST APIs? 33. What deployment/build tools do you use? 34. What is your approximate salary range in USD? 35. How do you lock down your servers for security? 36. Have your CF servers suffered from a hacking exploit in the last 2 years due to a CF-based vector? 37. What CF communities do you participate in? 38. What percentage of your PROFESSIONAL development time is spend on CFML? 39. What percentage of your HOBBY development time is spent on CFML? 40. What is your current arrangement for CF work? 41. Additional comments 42. TeraTech Inc Listen to the Audio And, here’s the full transcript of the podcast here You can download a 72-page state of the CF Union 2017 report here

026 Gitlab Server Deep Dive with Continuous Integration, with George Murphy Jun 09, 2017

Show notes

George Murphy talks about “Gitlab Server Deep Dive with Continuous Integration” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light. John was one of the speakers at the Into The Box ColdFusion Conference, where he talked about Gitlab server with Continuous Integration. Are you ready to do a deep dive into setting up a Gitlab Repository on your localhost and doing Continuous Integration with your team? Show notes Why Source Control is critical on every ColdFusion project Why a Git repository? (over subversion or CVS etc) Only save deltas of code changes, not copy whole repository Easier merging Git tags for code freezing, version releases Built for distributed team Immediate code sharing Concern over public vs private code repository Why Gitlab? Enterprise edition paid per user Community edition free You can run GitLab: on site on a Linux server VM Virtual box VM player or workstation Cloud Built in issue tracker Built in Continuous Integration Built in wiki for documentation 25+ 3rd party integrations including: Slack integration to notify commits made by team members in a certain slack channel Integration with JIRA, Bugzilla Alternative Git services: Github Bitbucket What is Continuous Integration and why you should be using it? Why are you proud to develop in CF? RAD of very complex apps Govt use CF a lot WWIT to make CF even more alive this year? Mentioned in this episode Bit N OBF files Virtual Box Digital Ocean droplets ESXI virtual machine No need for FTP or SSH GitLab CI tools - no need for Jenkins Slack 3rd party tools eg Kyber online meetings from Slack Jenkins Continuous Integration CommandBox Listen to the Audio Bio George Murphy George is a long time CF developer, focused on ColdBox and CF server maintenance. Currently Senior Software Developer at Fig Leaf Software. He's been working with and exploring various web technologies since the late nineties. ColdFusion aficionado since version 4.5. ColdBox Evangelist. Loves collaborating with other developers and bouncing ideas off them and having them bounce ideas off me. I truly love spending and sharing my time with my lovely wife, daughter and friends. Links Twitter Website (* WWIT = What Would It Take) Interview transcript Michaela Light: Welcome back to the show. I am Michaela Light from TeraTech, and I'm here with George Murphy, long time ColdFusion developer. He is an expert on GitLab, and he's giving a talk at Into The Box all about GitLab and some of its amazing features, including Continuous Integration. We're going to be talking about not just GitLab, but some other repositories you can use for source control. We'll also check in what the hell is source control, and why everyone who does ColdFusion should be using it. In our recent State of the Union survey, not everyone is using source control. We'll also look at what Continuous Integration is and why you should be using that, and how GitLab lets you do that for free, and some of the other features in there. Welcome, George. George Murphy: Thank you Michael. Michaela Light: Let's start off with, what the heck is source control? I know every listener here probably knows what it is, but just in case anyone didn't. Why is it critical to use it on every single ColdFusion project you do? George Murphy: To keep it real simple, source control is a way for developers to be able to commit their code and to be able to keep different versions of their code without having a bunch of folders and forgetting what folder you saved something in, or having your laptop or your work station hard drive crap out on you, and you have no way of going back to recover your code. That's what version control is. The beautiful thing about version control, it allows you to go back in time to a certain commit, and to be able to recover that entire repository exactly as it was when you committed it. You can go back, you can take a look, and then you can go forward from there, back to where you were. Michaela Light: If you were coding on a project, and heaven forbid, a bug appeared, you could see all the lines of code that have been changed by you or other teammates, and then that might help you figure out what was going on with it. Read more And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

025 Why Programming in Node is so Powerful, with Ray Camden Jun 04, 2017

Show notes

Ray Camden talks about “Why Programming in Node is so Powerful (how CFers can learn)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light. He is also one of the speakers at CFObjective Conference. In this talk, Raymond will introduce ColdFusion developers to Node.js development. This will be a high-level talk more focused on the "mechanics" of working with Node versus a deep dive into the language. The focus will be on, "Given that I do so and so in ColdFusion, what is it like to do the same in a Node app?" I'll discuss how to get started, what it is like to deploy a Node application, how to test, where to learn more, as well as talk about the things that tripped me up on my way from CF to Node. Show notes What is Node.js? Server based JavaScript engine Why program in Node? Same syntax as client based JavaScript Very light weight What is the hardest thing for a CFer learning Node? Node Deployment tips How to test your Node app Why are you proud to use CF? Practical Get stuff down fast Easy to learn WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year? Medium articles Other non-CF conferences What are you looking forward to at CFObjective? Mentioned in this episode Node.js Wikipedia on Node.js Twitter Node.js Digital Ocean droplet BlueMix by IBM Now by Zeit.co Docker AWS CommandBox CF Debugging talk by Gert Franz Charlie Arehart Lazy loading Micro-services Go language CF Alive Serverless podcast Listen to the Audio Bio Raymond Camden Raymond Camden is a developer advocate for IBM. His work focuses on LoopBack, API Connect, serverless, hybrid mobile development, Node.js, HTML5, and web standards in general. He's a published author and presents at conferences and user groups on a variety of topics. Raymond can be reached at his blog (www.raymondcamden.com), @raymondcamden on Twitter, or via email at raymondcamden@gmail.com. Links Website Twitter Linked In Jedi Master (* WWIT = What Would It Take) Interview transcript Michael: Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Ray Camden and he is the developer advocate for IBM and he does an amazing amount of stuff. He works on Loopback, API Connect, Servilus, hybrid mobile development, HTML 5, web standards, and Node JS which is what we're hear to talk about today. Fortunately, Ray has his army of storm troopers with him in the room, just in case there are any difficult questions that have to be handled. I take it you're a great fan of Star Wars, I think I've known that for a long time. Ray Camden: Just a little bit. Michael: Just a little. In today's episode, Node JS for Cfers, we're gonna look at what Node JS really is, why you should be programming in it, and what the hardest thing for a Cfer learning node is. We'll also look at deployment tips, how you can test your node applications, and also Ray is going to be talking on the subject of CF objectives, so we will be looking at that as well. Welcome, Ray. Ray Camden: Thank you. Thank you so much. Michael: For those few people who've been isolated in the universe and don't know what Node JS is, what exactly is it? Read more And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

024 CFML Debugging Jedi Tricks and Templates, with Gert Franz May 31, 2017

Show notes

Gert Franz talks about “CFML Debugging Jedi Tricks and Templates” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive Podcast with host Michaela Light. He is also one of the speakers at CFObjective Conference. In this session, we will have a closer look at the debugging templates Lucee and Adobe ColdFusion have aboard. Especially in Lucee, there is a lot of hidden information buried in the depths of the data. You can extract this data and write your own fancy debugging template. In Lucee this is a simple CFC that contains a few methods which display the data. As a takeaway from the session, you will receive a shiny new debugging template for Lucee which you can extend as you see fit. Show notes What is a debugging template? The debugging template displays the info that can be optionally displayed at the bottom of every page, containing the formatted debugging information provided by the CFML engine Why use a debugging template? Gives lots of info what has happened in the code, what CFC run, what parts were slow What about security? Limit debugging display to certain IP addresses Don’t turn on in production Be careful about displaying information about your application to the public What is the overhead of turning this feature on? 1-2% overhead in Lucee (in ACF it used to be 50% many years ago) Why write your own? There is tons of additional info in the debugging information which may or may not be displayed by the selected debugging information. You can decorate the data with your own additional info Do I need some special skills to work on the debugging templates? Just a regular CFC Create a configuration struct containing the info you want to have displayed Output method What happens if you have a bug in your debugging template The regular CFML error handler kicks in Lucee debugging handling extra features More granularity by website and IP Has additional information in the debugging Debugging and Performance jedi tricks Rewrite the code as tag or script as appropriate in order to understand it The Code Monkey (wrong) - talk to a plushie and explain your problem, often helps solving the issue yourself. Apparently I used the wrong term. It is rubber duck debugging. Make a copy of the code and ruthlessly cut out pieces until the error doesn’t happen anymore - the last piece you cut is related to the bug Format your code, even your SQL What I learned from the Railo project To be happy and to do what you love To let go the past How can I contribute to Lucee, how can I help? Become a supporter or even a member, if you want to get involved in the future of Lucee Why should I attend any conference You will be learning many new techniques, meet cool people, get to know who is behind all the magic, network Is it still worth learning Lucee or CFML? You get better rates at freelance jobs It is a very modern language Why are you proud to use CF? Because I helped develop the language and keep it from vanishing WWIT for you to make CF more alive this year? Speak about it, be proud to use it, write your apps with it What are you looking forward to at CFObjective? Meet my friends Great topics and great presenters See the capital again :) Very often people just stick with the debugging templates that come with either Lucee or ACF. They are nice and helpful, but if one wants way more information, he needs to unlock the potential and extend the existing ones or even write his own new debugging template. Mentioned in this episode Pete Freitag (CF security) Ray Camden’s Var Scope checker The Ultimate Var Scope Resource list “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.” Ferris Bueller Lucee website Listen to the Audio Bio Gert Franz Gert was born in 1967 and lives in Switzerland since 1997. He is one of the key people behind Lucee. Back in the late eighties he studied Astrophysics in Munich but switched to later IT as a profession and programmed for several companies in the past as a database administrator and system analyst. Links Rasia Twitter LinkedIn (* WWIT = What Would It Take) Interview transcript Michael: Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Gert Franz, astrophysicist and expert on LUCEE CFML, in face he's the evangelist for it. When I said astrophysicist I think he did that like 25 years ago so we won't ask him any difficult questions about the galaxies, but we will be asking him a lot of questions about debugging templates and Jedi tricks he has for debugging and error handling and also look at how you could write your own debugging templates and why you might want to do that. Also we're asking him a bit about cf.Objective where he's going to be talking about debugging templates and also ask a little bit about LUCEE, and Railo, and all kinds of other ColdFusion related things. So welcome Gert. Gert: Yes. Welcome Michael. Long time no see, I guess it's about three, four weeks ago right when we had met? Michael: Yes. I think there was some Texan barbecue being served and I think it was a mariachi band at the Into The Box conference. Read more And to continue learning how to make your ColdFusion apps more modern and alive, I encourage you to download our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.Because… perhaps you are responsible for a mission-critical or revenue-generating CF application that you don’t trust 100%, where implementing new features is a painful ad-hoc process with slow turnaround even for simple requests.What if you have no contingency plan for a sudden developer departure or a server outage? Perhaps every time a new freelancer works on your site, something breaks. Or your application availability, security, and reliability are poor.And if you are depending on ColdFusion for your job, then you can’t afford to let your CF development methods die on the vine.You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be OK using the same old app creation ways in that one language — forever.All it would take is for your fellow CF developer to quit or for your CIO to decide to leave the (falsely) perceived sinking ship of CFML and you could lose everything—your project, your hard-won CF skills, and possibly even your job.Luckily, there are a number of simple, logical steps you can take now to protect yourself from these obvious risks.No Brainer ColdFusion Best Practices to Ensure You Thrive No Matter What Happens NextColdFusion Alive Best Practices ChecklistModern ColdFusion development best practices that reduce stress, inefficiency, project lifecycle costs while simultaneously increasing project velocity and innovation.√ Easily create a consistent server architecture across development, testing, and production√ A modern test environment to prevent bugs from spreading√ Automated continuous integration tools that work well with CF√ A portable development environment baked into your codebase… for free! Learn about these and many more strategies in our free ColdFusion Alive Best Practices Checklist.

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